I haven’t been posting them, but I’ve been playing with seamless repeating patterns since the beginning of the year. While it’s mostly been flowers and other sort of geometric shapes, there was this one file I started with the intention to fill with as many unique, organic shapes as I could, and this pattern of sea critters started to take shape. It took me a three or four sesssions to finish it (over the course of several months!), but it’s finally done!

I learned a little trick while I was working on this one. I kept testing it out and in spite of all of the unique shapes, I was still really aware of exactly where the tiles were seaming. I had overlapping shapes, but it wasn’t until I started using certain motifs over again within the tile that the rhythm finally broke up enough for me and the pattern started to feel more natural to my eyes. The tiling isn’t 100% invisible, especially at this small size, but it’s a lot better than where it started (I don’t see any strong path of  white running through it anymore, for instance), and I’m really proud of this one

Tags: animals, art, ocean, patterns, sea life, vector

Three seamless patterns I made this morning

Surely there are more productive things I could be doing with my time. Especially because I can see the potential to sit around for hours moving individual elements in these patterns this way and that to keep any given pattern from looking too…tiley.

Fortunately I’m ultimately just not that obsessive, and thus I managed to make these fun little patterns in between waiting for video to render, or uploading some commercial to the server, or, y’know, whatever it was that I was supposed to have been doing this morning .

I have tiles suitable for desktops and backgrounds for websites. Shoot me a comment and I’ll make them available.

(previously, Seamless Repeating Patterns)

Tags: doodles, illustrator, monsters, patterns, seamless, vector

Attempt #1 - I don't know if you all know, but I can draw more than just cute critters!

I found this neat little tutorial about creating seamless repeating patters over on designsponge a few weeks ago and I decided to play with it this weekend. I turned them both into desktop wallpapers; just click on the one you like, and you can right-click>save as background.

I didn’t have anything in particular in mind when I started, but I had just heard an interview with the chick from Jefferson Airplane about the origin of the song White Rabbit, so this ended up being an Alice-themed pattern. I think the cat is neat, but I think I ended up with too much detail in the mushroom vignette for it to read well at the size it ended up being in the wallpaper. Also, the two vignettes don’t really overlap much so it’s not as impressive.

Attempt #2 - A Badger and a Snail in green. Still ended up a bit squarish.

The second one ended up working out a little better in terms of integrating the design together, but I think I’d be better off if I made a plan before I started. Anyway, they’re fun to do, and with practice I’ll get better at them.

If you’re downloading them as wallpapers, they should work for screensizes and dimensions similar to 1024×768. I only made one version each so if you need another size feel free to leave me a comment and I’d be happy to tile you up a different size.

Tags: alice in wonderland, art, badger, cheshire cat, design, drawing, patterns, snail

I am addicted to a little site called Threadless to the point that I had to put an embargo on buying t-shirts from them because it was getting expensive. I promised myself that I would not buy another shirt from threadless until I had one published there myself.

Except that I really, really need this shirt:

Seriously. This is printed on the inside of the shirt:

But, look, I don’t want to go back on my embargo. Because I need to start submitting my art to places where it might get rejected (the reasons why are a whole ‘nother post entirely).  I also made a resolution to submit a design once a month this year, and I haven’t done it yet (granted, I made that resolution a week before the end of January, so it doesn’t count).

So here’s what I’m going to do. In the next week or so I’m going to submit my first design to Threadless, and beg you all to vote for it, and to get your friends, your family, your dog, to vote for it, too. I promise to try to make it as awesome as I can, because I respect the Threadless community, and I’m not about to submit junk just to fulfill some wierd obligation to myself. I’ll give myself leeway by buying the Invasion shirt if I get something submitted myself, regardless of whether it wins, and then I’ll go right back to the original embargo.

But, I’d really, really like to win

Tags: cute t shirts, embargo, monsters, t shirt design, threadless

You might say I have “unicorn issues.” I like them; that should be fairly clear by the fact that this blog is called blackunicorn.org. I don’t tend to draw unicorns, though. I used to, back when I was in junior high, or early high school. And then I just stopped, I suppose because the College Board didn’t take kindly to my AP portfolio having a bunch of fantasy art in it. I didn’t pass, which was a devastating blow to my ego.

I didn’t really do anything remarkable in college- there isn’t a whole lot other than my graphic design work that was very good- my drawings were very stiff, or very obsessive about detail. I learned a lot, but I don’t have a whole lot of work I’m proud of to show for it.

Meanwhile, this movie came out my senior year. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it- Napoleon Dynamite. I hated this movie. I can’t remember another movie I so viscerally disliked as Napoleon Dynamite. I could never get on board with the whole “Let’s start wearing the uniform of the un-cool social group” trend. You know, how all of a sudden it became edgy and cool to wear t-shirts with sentimental pictures of horses? See, I was one of those kids who wore stuff like that in school, and I was ostracized for it. And now the cool kids have adopted that? That’s not fair. (also trucker hats piss me off, but that’s another rant entirely. Breifly, I think it’s subtle class warfare)

And unicorns, too. Cool kids suddenly love unicorns. But only ironic unicorns. Because if you earnestly like unicorns, you’re not in on the joke, as a matter of fact, you’re kind of the object of ridicule. Well, I like unicorns. I like this shirt collection I found on CafePress because it reminds me of all the good and sweet and magical things I liked about unicorns in the first place. And the cool kids can’t have it, because it’s not ironic enough. I think maybe if the star and moon didn’t have smiley faces it might skate the line between good-enough-for-the-cool-kids and Just Good, but it’s just too nice to be in on the joke.

I think there’s a place in the world for earnestly cute and sweet things. There needs to be some innocence left, untouched by that making-fun-of-nerds subtext that seems to be all over the place nowadays. I think I need to start drawing unicorns again.

Tags: art, cute, ironic, Napoleon Dynamite, POD Stuff, unicorns